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Mill Street Beer Hall in the Distillery District open last year seats 565 people.
(Aaron Harris / For the Toronto Star)

Located in the heart of the Distillery District, Cluny Bistro & Boulangerie sits 450 including the patio and event space.

The open concept second and third floor dining rooms at The Fourth on Danforth. Teh restaurant seats 150. (Lucas Oleniuk / Toronto Star)

Los Colibris restaurant is the upscale sister restaurant to El Caballito on King St. W. It seats 130 diners.

By Karon LiuSpecial to the Star

Wed., Aug. 13, 2014

More condos, smaller spaces and a relatively stable economy are just some factors that have led to the growth of larger restaurants in downtown Toronto in the past year.

Amsterdam BrewHouse seats 500 inside, another 300 on the patio; Mill Street Beer Hall seats 565; El Caballito and its upscale sister restaurant Los Colibris, 210 seats in private dining areas and a tequila tasting room; Cluny seats 450 including the patio and event space and Montecito’s12,000 square foot restaurant built from the ground up has room for 280 people.

Indeed, restaurants have been scaling up with patios fit for you and your 99 friends and dining rooms with more square footage than a dozen Parkdale restaurants.

The day before the grand opening of Colette Grand Café in the Thompson Hotel, chef Michael Steh is out of the kitchen and fiddling with a reading lamp in the library section.

Yes, the restaurant has a library section. The 150 seat bistro inspired by the south of France has breezy colour schemes of ocean blues and white sand lit by floor-to-ceiling windows. In addition to the library lounge, there’s a bakery, marble bar, solarium, patio and another dining room.

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“We divided the space up into smaller environments,” Steh says, to keep the space from feeling cavernous.

Steh’s business partner, Steven Salm, sees the emergence of larger restaurants as a natural progression as a city becomes a bigger player on a global stage.

“Toronto is becoming a world-class city and in the last decade it’s been managed by the main heavy players,” he says. “It’s great to see the confidence in the market.”

Several restaurant groups are showing that confidence including:

Charles Khabouth’s INK Entertainment, which owns Byblos, Patria, and Weslodge; SIR Corp.’s Scaddabush, Jack Astor’s and REDS; The Distillery Group’s El Catrin and just opened Cluny; and Salm’s Chase Hospitality Group, which owns Colette, The Chase, its downstairs seafood counterpart The Chase Fish and Oyster, and an adjoining takeout spot called Little Fin, slated to open this summer.

Even Pizzeria Libretto is getting a third location on King West and a fourth on University Ave.

These restaurant groups rose alongside condo construction, says Salm. “People don’t have big kitchens and don’t see those spaces as a family environment.

However, in neighbourhoods that have not experienced a boom in highrise living, the big restaurant boom has been slow. In fact in the east end just one big resto opened this year: The Forth at Pape Ave. and Danforth Ave. It has 150 seats over two floors of dining space. It will open a roof top patio next year.

“Summer time has been slow, and we weren’t a part of Summerlicious so it went quiet,” says Forth chef Chris Kalisperas. “It’s picking up again now. The good thing is that we can use it as a function room and that’s how a large place can balance it out.”

But bigger restaurants have more obstacles than just filling more seats, Staffing larger spaces is a challenge. “There’s an issue of shortage across the board because the growth is exceeding what’s coming out of the schools,” says Steh.

Some cooks scoff at working at larger restaurants, conjuring up images of bland wedding reception food for unadventurous diners.

“A lot of guys want to work at the smaller, cooler restaurants,” says Kalisperas. “There’s still a stigma around working at the big restaurants.”

So he’s open to training new staff, like the commerce student about to drop out to pursue his dream of being a full-time cook.

The Distillery District, just steps from the athletes’ village for next year’s Pan Am Games has high concentration of 100-plus seat restaurants, including the Mill Street Beer Hall, owned by Mill St. which opened last year. And El Catrin, owned by the Distillery Restaurant Corp., which replaced the Boiler House in July 2013.

Since we opened Pure Spirits and Boiler House in 2003, Toronto diners have become more knowledgeable about global cuisines and more open to trying the unfamiliar, says Distillery Restaurant partner Mathew Rosenblatt.

“If you went back 20 years, there were way fewer people living in the core and now there are thousands of condominiums,” Rosenblatt says. “They create more demand and this allows for greater specialization in restaurants. This allows us to not just serve Mexican food at El Catrin, but focus on a specific area of Mexican cuisine. If you did that 15 years ago, you’d probably need 90 per cent of the population to support a concept like this. Now you need 5 per cent.”

El Catrin, an 5,000-square-foot restaurant, cost about $1.5 million to build and design — colourful murals with Day of the Dead iconography, a black-lit wall of painted skulls, and light fixtures as large as a witch’s cauldron.

Next door is the just-opened Cluny bistro and patisserie. It cost $3- to $4 million to turn a vacant storage space into a dreamy 450-seat French restaurant and bakery filled with antiques and street lamps that look like they are straight from the Champs-Élysées.

“What we’re trying to do as a restaurant company is to deliver an experience combining design, music, service and food,” Rosenblatt says. “You can’t create that larger-than-life concept in a small place.”

Of course, this does not spell the end of the 30-seat, no-reservation restaurants.

“There will always be restaurants of every size opening,” says Steh. “We need those smaller places because there are chefs who thrive in that environment.”

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